As I’ve observed this primary two things have struck and perplexed me. First, I’ve been struck by the prevalence of electability arguments. To me these are very strange arguments. One says that while they find a particular candidate’s platform closer to their to their own beliefs, they just can’t support that candidate because they’re unelectable. We hear this argument made countless times, by incredibly large numbers of people. That’s what makes the argument so strange. If all of these people just supported that candidate they WOULD be electable. In other words, the electability argument is a self-fulfilling policy. The people making that argument are CREATING the very unelectability they claim motivates their endorsement.
The second argument I hear is even stranger. In the case of Sanders, I hear countless supporters argue that Sanders doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell getting his legislative proposals passed (I agree!) so we shouldn’t support him (Joe makes a Scooby-Doo sound, “hurrrr?”). We shouldn’t propose or support proposing legislation that can’t get passed? How does that make sense? There are two perfectly reasonable reasons for proposing and fighting for your IDEAL legislation: First, you propose your IDEAL legislation as an opening move in the negotiation process so you END UP with the legislation you can TOLERATE. You don’t START by proposing the legislation that you can tolerate, because then, during the negotiation process, you’ll end up with intolerable legislation. It’s no different than the dance you go through when buying a car or house. Second, and more importantly, you propose your IDEAL legislation because making a PUBLIC case for it transforms it into a possibility in the minds of the American public.
We might not get that legislation tomorrow, next week, next year, or for TWO DECADES, but in making a case for it, we educate the public, we persuade them to become more comfortable with those ideas, and eventually, voila, people start demanding it. That’s how Reagan did it. He pursued things that he knew he didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell getting. He defended those things vigorously. And you know what? While Reagan didn’t get even 10% of that legislation during his presidency, by the time Clinton came to office CLINTON defended, pursued, and passed the tax, regulatory, penal, and entitlement reforms that REAGAN wanted. Bill Clinton was the Reagan that Reagan always wanted to be. That was Reagan’s success. That was his triumph. And he accomplished that by defending pie in the sky ideas. Why can’t we have a left version of that? Why don’t we defend left policies so that a day comes when REPUBLICANS are pursuing OUR policies?
And then it hit me. There’s a sizable segment of the democratic rank and file that has been deeply traumatized by the success of the republicans and by the way that, since Clinton, they’ve gradually taken over nearly all branches of government. The panic and fear is palpable. And what has happened as a result of that panic? The rise of the “Stockholm Democrat”. I’m sure you know what Stockholm Syndrome is. Someone is taken hostage and they begin to internalize the ideology and believe system of those that kidnapped them. This can occur in a couple different ways. Someone can EXPLICITLY come to advocate the ideology and belief systems of their captors. The person actually joins that religion. However, another way is more subtle and unconscious: It’s not that the person comes to advocate the kidnapper’s ideology, but that they come to unconsciously see the world through that lens. For example, maybe the kidnapper believes that everyone is entirely motivated by crass selfishness. The horrific actions the hostage taker does are an attempt to take revenge on the selfish world. The hostage might not share the kidnapper’s proposed solution to callous selfishness, but nonetheless comes to internalize the kidnapper’s view of people as selfish shits that don’t give a damn about anyone else. The hostage comes to interpret all other people as selfish shits.
Something like this has happened with a sizable number of democrats. They have Stockholm syndrome and have internalized the worldview of their republican opponents. The triumph of the republicans over these democrats is two-fold: The first belief that Stockholm democrats has internalized is that the majority of the American population thinks like republicans and shares the beliefs of republicans. Accordingly, Stockholm democrats believe that we can only propose center-right policy because the public will never embrace anything else and therefore won’t show up at the polls. The second belief Stockholm democrats have internalized is far more destructive. They believe that the public can’t be PERSUADED. In their view, public opinion is what it is. Consequently, the job of our elected leaders is to FOLLOW what the public believes, rather than FORM public belief. As a consequence, we end up proposing luke-warm republican policy. The republicans are the party of ideas and we just try to temper or moderate their craziness.
The thing is, people don’t support leaders who don’t fight or stand for anything. That’s why the public doesn’t show up. If we’d just get over our Stockholm syndrome, if we would just fight for better ideas, if we’d stop being loser and wimpy “pragmatic realists” and “incrementalists”, we might very well find more people showing up at the polls and eventually find that even republicans would take many of our ideas as obvious, just as so many democrats take certain republican axioms as self-evident without realizing it.
